LibertyLizard

The mitochondria is the ~~powerhouse~~ corn dog of the cell.

It’s inevitable. Electoral politics means working with and being absorbed by the powers that be. I don’t think AOC is a bad person. She is trying to tilt the needle I expect. But to be effective she has to gain the support of those people who have made themselves our enemies. And therein lies the poison of the system.

We need to build an external movement powerful enough to demand obedience from our leaders, not just beg for it.

They call it torture if you do it to prisoners but totally fine for our children!

I’ve been dreaming about this for decades. One challenge is that cities can’t directly control upstream pollution on rivers, which is generally the most common form of accessible swimming area.

We need better governance structures for rivers and other systems where selfish actions by people can cause harm distant to where it originates.

I think a big part of it is trauma from trump and his enablers. Honestly, a few years ago my sentiments might have been more similar to the people criticizing me but more thought made me realize how dangerous it is to leave this power in a small number of unaccountable people.

I agree, I was overly broad with this comment. But I think that even community management needs to be constrained from interfering with human expression when there is no harm being done. And non-sexual nudity is clearly not harmful.

I guess I need to say this again: I’m talking about the way things should work, not how they do currently. Sure, it’s totally legal for private companies to ban any content they want to. And in some societies, the king can legally murder people. The legality of those situations is not synonymous with their morality.

If you are arguing that legally, YouTube is permitted to remove this content, you’ve misunderstood what this thread is about. If you’re arguing they should be allowed to do this, then please focus your statements on that topic.

By the way, I think private malls are also pretty questionable. Community space should be managed by the community, and it should be managed with respect for individual freedoms. But this is not really a comparable situation unless there was a mall that hosted a huge proportion of the products being sold. Exclusion from this mall, even if there are minor alternatives, is not just a matter of personal preference. It’s harmful to be excluded if that’s where everyone is.

As far as rules in town squares: of course. But these rules are typically determined democratically and are limited so as to respect human freedom. That’s what I’m asking for in this case as well. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be rules at all.

I don’t really agree with this framing. There are plenty of things that Israel can do to protect their citizens and weaken Hamas that don’t involve murdering thousands of civilians.

It’s debatable whether this conflict will even weaken Hamas long-term. I think it’s been a huge boon to their image and it seems fairly likely they’ll be able to rebuild even stronger when the killing ends.

The best way to destroy Hamas is to make peace, stop killing and oppressing Palestinians, grant them equal rights to Jewish Israelis, redistribute land fairly, educate the populace and promote real democracy. Hamas’s extreme views won’t be popular in the absence of a great evil to scapegoat.

I reject the premise that YouTube belongs to the executives or shareholders at Alphabet. It is a community platform at this point, and its management should reflect that.

If Alphabet happened to own an entire city I would also oppose their right to restrict expression there. Once a space, physical or digital, comes to be used in certain ways, it should no longer anyone’s personal property.

I think these mega-platforms are way too different from an individual’s website to make that equivalence. The dominant social media companies are, as Elon Musk eloquently put it before shitting all over his own moral principles, more akin to a town square than a back yard. The fact that they are privately owned is a corruption resulting from our authoritarian legal structure—it doesn’t make them morally equivalent to a website I use and produce by myself.

YouTube is a place that tolerates almost any viewpoint or type of content. No one thinks that they actively support or endorse this content. In fact, US law explicitly exempts them from being responsible for it. If that’s the case, why should we grant them the authority to decide what should or shouldn’t be posted there?

Now, there is certainly content, in contrast to non-sexual nudity, that does direct harm, and I support the removal of such content. But either way, I don’t think YouTube deserves the unilateral authority to decide what that looks like. I’d much rather see it managed communally and democratically.

Frankly, I was mostly mouthing off here, not trying to voice deep moral reasoning but I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I’m actually not sure that fundamental human rights do exist—at least not in all circumstances. As you point out, they sometimes conflict and we need to adjudicate whose rights are more fundamental in a given situation.

You have a good point and I generally agree that there does exist a tension here. I think where it breaks down is when a platform becomes so large and dominant that there isn’t really any significant alternative. I think morally, this shifts my reasoning away from just a collection of individuals deciding what they want on their platform towards an almost state-like entity. And with that power dynamic I am much more skeptical of their unilateral authority to control what is or isn’t posted on their platform. Given the size and structure of YouTube, it makes more sense to think of it as space that belongs to and should be managed by the community and with respect for individual rights of expression. And I feel strongly that non-sexual nudity is not only not harmful, but that it is very harmful to repress, as we see in this specific example.

I’m not talking about the US constitution here. I’m saying it is a fundamental human right regardless of the law. What clothing to wear (or not) is part of that freedom.

Private companies should also not restrict fundamental freedoms. I’m aware they’re allowed to currently.